Whiptail claims flash storage array win

Flash storage array vendor Whiptail says its Infinity array will scale the six-node 72TB Invicta array up to 30 nodes and up to 360TB of all-flash storage in the first quarter of next year.

The firm claimed that will make Invicta Infinity the highest-capacity, highest-performing, and most flexible enterprise-class modular solid-state storage array on the market.

"One clear theme that we’ve heard from our customers is, ‘we want more,’" said Whiptail CEO Dan Crain. "What they are discovering is once they start moving their data and applications to Whiptail, their productivity increases so much that they want to bring all of their business critical apps to flash. It’s like eating potato chips, you can’t stop with just one."

The company used comments from Joseph Unsworth, research vice president at Gartner, to support its announcement. "Data centre high-performance storage needs are constantly evolving, especially among the most progressive data centre customers," said Unsworth. "Companies that can deliver flexible solutions that scale easily and with minimal disruption will be best positioned to address these dynamic requirements."

Whiptail said that in initial testing, a 180TB, 15-node Invicta Infinity produced performance numbers of 2.1 million IOPS and 21.8GB/second throughput.

"We expect a fully-populated 30 node, 360TB Infinity to exceed 4 million IOPS and 40GB/second throughput in real world use," said Whiptail CTO James Candelaria. "We’re breaking down the data silos, but more importantly, we’re allowing the enterprise to think about flash strategically rather than tactically. You no longer have to worry about hot and cold data when you can have everything available on Whiptail solutions."

"This is just the beginning for us when it comes to the product roadmap," said Crain. "With the latest version of our Racerunner OS, we focused on solving a huge IT headache by allowing data replication across heterogeneous platforms. Now we’re moving into the high capacity space. I think it’s easy to see that we’re dedicated to giving our customers more flexibility and will be delivering a steady diet of enhancements throughout 2013."